by Bill Yenne
The duplicitous boy with the soft hands reached his late teens as the war reached its climax. By 1918, the enthusiastic days of banners and glory had been superseded on German streets by the harsh reality of wounded veterans, food shortages, and bad news from the front. Nevertheless, the middle son of the stern schoolmaster still hung on to dreams of glory.
Seeing his middle son yearning for the military life, the elder Himmler pulled some strings with his friends in the Bavarian court in June 1917, and got young Heini on the list for future army-officer candidate school. In the meantime, the young Himmler had apparently joined the 11th Bavarian Infantry Regiment as an enlisted man. He had entertained thoughts of joining the kaiser’s navy, but they did not accept recruits who wore glasses. Though he was on the roster of the 11th Regiment, he never served anywhere near the front. His later claims to have led troops in battle were fabricated. He saw no combat and had not completed officer training before the war ended on November 11, 1918.
For Germany, it was a crushing defeat. In losing World War I, the Second Reich imploded. With the failure of the bold spring and summer 1918 offensives crafted by Field Marshal Erich Ludendorff, it was apparent within Germany that defeat was imminent, and social order began to disintegrate. Once the most powerful monarch on the continent of Europe, Kaiser Wilhelm II saw his authority weakened by discontent within the ranks by 1918 and abdicated on November 9—after three decades on the throne as the second and last modern German emperor.
Meanwhile, the Austro-Hungarian Empire also ceased to exist. Austrian emperor Franz Josef I, who had reigned for sixty-eight years, died in 1916, but his grandnephew Karl abdicated within days of Kaiser Wilhelm, as the last of the empire’s non-German dominions slipped away. While the Second Reich imploded, the Austro-Hungarian Empire disintegrated. The land ruled from Vienna at the end of 1918 was about 12 percent the size of the empire that was ruled from that city in 1914.
In both countries, especially in Germany, there was a power vacuum into which flowed idealogues from across the political spectrum. On both ends of the spectrum, extremist political parties, some with their own private armies, cropped up. Indeed, numerous alternative parties had been growing in popularity during the latter months of the war, as Germany lost the battlefield initiative and as the kaiser’s government grew visibly weaker. Many of these political movements shared an opposition to the war and the monarchy, especially when it became apparent that the war was not winnable. And all shared a dissatisfaction with the postwar status quo after the November armistice.
On the far left, socialists and communists, inspired by the success of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, attempted to seize power. In fact, a socialist government led by the charismatic Kurt Eisner ruled in Bavaria for a few months during the winter of 1918–1919.
Heinrich Himmler grew up in Landshut on the Isar River, just down the hill from the thirteenth-century Burg Trusnitz. He spent his childhood staring up at this stone castle and imagining a bygone era of ancient heroes, knights, and glory. Author’s collection
On the right were the nationalists who were nostalgic for the glory days of German military and political power. After decades of being subjects of the most powerful and well-ordered nation in Europe, the nationalists felt the emptiness of disorder and of the remnants of their reich collapsing around them. Many nationalists blamed wartime industrial strikes arranged by communists and socialists for Germany’s loss of the war and, therein, the loss of its honor as a nation. Their perception that the communists and socialists had stabbed Germany in the back infuriated the nationalists.
In June 1919, the wartime allies who had defeated Germany in World War I handed German extremists of all stripes a gift upon which they could agree. The Treaty of Versailles, which officially concluded World War I, was so harsh in its humiliating treatment of Germany that it was vilified by both the right and left within Germany. Indeed, the treaty demanded that Germany accept sole responsibility for the war. While Germany had been the principal combatant among the Central Powers, plenty of nations on both sides had a share in the blame for the war having started. Because Germany had been so obviously singled out, the treaty provided the extremist rabble-rousers with a convenient lightning rod to use in their public diatribes.
After a winter of discontent, a conference held in the city of Weimar in August 1919 finally settled on a democratic constitution to replace the German monarchy. Though the Weimar Republic brought some structure to the postwar political void in Germany, it was a compromise that essentially pleased no one. The extremist political parties on both right and left merely added disaffection with the Weimar Republic to their long lists of grievances.
Also on this list was the economic collapse that Germany suffered after the end of the war. It is impossible to exaggerate the impact of this economic crisis. Unemployment and hyperinflation reached staggering levels that have few, if any, comparisons in the history of modern industrialized nations. These conditions crippled and eventually doomed the Weimar Republic.
Heinrich Himmler, meanwhile, was down on the farm. During the summer of 1919, as the Weimar government was formed and as dissatisfaction over Versailles swept the land, he had left the city to work as a farm laborer. Like many a city boy with a summer job on a farm, Himmler was overwhelmed with the rustic charm of rural life. He even joined and became a leader in a short-lived back-to-the-land organization called the Artamanen Gesellschaft (Artaman League), which boasted two thousand members in 1924. Himmler and the Artamenen were not alone, nor were the Artamanen the first to want to turn urban wage slaves into jolly peasants. Throughout the late nineteenth century, German intellectuals with too much time on their hands had embraced a romantic notion of the peasantry being a link to the pure, agrarian roots of the German national identity. This idea became the foundation of what had come to be known as the Völkische—literally translated as “folkish” or “folksy”—movement. At its simplest, the Völkisch idea was a reaction to the cultural alienation of the post-industrial world. The movement embodied a nostalgia, which appealed to both right and left, for the quaintness of an agrarian past and the village life of simpler, happier times.
Part and parcel with the Völkisch movement was the Blut und Boden (blood and soil) ideology in which one’s “blood” (ethnicity) is intertwined with one’s “soil” (traditional homeland). A corollary to this concept is that those who cultivate the soil of their forefathers have a stronger connection with their ancestral ethnic identity that city dwellers.
The Völkisch movement gained considerable popularity as a subcurrent of Germanic culture and self-identity in both Germany and Austria in the late nineteenth century. (In this, it was not unlike the back-to-the-land movement in the United States of the 1960s, which saw numbers of American college students dropping out and going off—usually for no more than a few warm summer months—to rural agricultural communes.) For Himmler, his own brief stint on the farm ended ignominiously when he suffered a bout with salmonella poisoning.
In September 1919, during the last month of his teenage years, Himmler moved, along with his parents, to Igolstadt, where his father had taken another job as a school principal. A month later, he entered the Universität München (University of Munich), planning to study agriculture.
At the university, he traded in his glasses for a pince-nez, which he thought made him look more important and more grown up. He also went out for fencing, the traditionally favored sport of the German military caste. Indeed, flaunting a dueling scar on one’s face had been the premier status symbol among the Prussian elite. However, potential opponents found Himmler a demeaning competitor because he was so small and so frail. Reportedly, he did not earn his scar for three years. At the same time, he turned out to be a poor candidate for college fraternity life because his weak stomach made it hard for him to drink beer.
It was a time when much of Germany had lost its stomach for militarism, but there were still those who yearned for the days when Germany was
Europe’s superpower. For them, there were opportunities not only in the traditional arts such as fencing, but also in the private militias that sprang up around the political parties.
Like the Second Reich itself, the wartime Imperial German Army had ceased to exist in 1918, and reconstituting it was forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles. Having come close to losing to the German army, the Allies did not want it back. The treaty did, however, allow the Weimar Republic to stand up a glorified national police force, a weak entity known as the Reichswehr. This entity could hardly absorb the millions of unemployed veterans who drifted about Germany looking for work and for meaning in their lives. Many of those nostalgic for military life eschewed the feeble Reichswehr to join a number of paramilitary freikorps (free corps), militias that sprang up across Germany in the service of the vast left-to-right spread of political ideologies. Among these was the Reichskreigsflagge, the nationalist freikorps that Heinrich Himmler would later join.
Among the myriad of nationalist political parties from which to choose, Himmler would later join that which evolved from the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP, or German Workers’ Party). The DAP was created in Munich in January 1919 by locksmith Anton Drexler, a former member of the Fatherland Party, and journalist Karl Harrer. In the beginning, the party was just one of many gaggles of malcontents, but over time it would evolve into a monster.
Among the DAP’s early members were economist Gottfried Feder and playwright Dietrich Eckart, though it attracted a number of war veterans to its fold. One such veteran was Rudolf Hess, the Egypt-born son of a German merchant. Hess had served with the 7th Bavarian Field Artillery Regiment and briefly as a fighter pilot during the war. He had been awarded the Iron Cross, second class, and came to the DAP having also been a member of the Eiserne Faust (Iron Fist) freikorps.
The DAP also attracted a few men who were still in uniform. One in particular was a thirty-year-old Austrian who had earned an Iron Cross, first class, while serving as a corporal with the 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment. Having joined the postwar Reichswehr, he was assigned to infiltrate and spy on the DAP. However, he instead liked what he saw and officially joined the DAP on September 12, 1919. He was a man with big ideas and a big mouth, and his remarkable gift for oratory caught the attention of the party founders. They recognized that this man would be an extraordinary spokesman for their fledgling political organization.
The man’s name was Adolf Hitler.
CHAPTER 2
The Court of the Godfather
THE MUNICH OF HEINRICH HIMMLER’S university years was a turbulent place, not unlike American college campuses in the late 1960s. In Germany in 1920, as in the United States in 1968, the political turmoil on the streets spilled onto the country’s campuses. Political organizations with extreme views and zealous adherents came and went, morphed into alternate incarnations, merged and fractured. Disagreements often turned violent. Demonstrations and counter-demonstrations were common student activities, though, as in the 1960s in the United States, those who stirred up the crowds were often not students.
As on the American campuses of the 1960s, advocates across the spectrum of political beliefs rubbed shoulders on the postwar German and Austrian streets with proponents of a cultural revolution. Just as there were political tides that surged against the post-imperial establishment, there was a cultural tsunami whose 1960s analog would be termed a “counterculture,” and whose 1980s analog would be called the “New Age” movement.
In Germany and Austria in the 1920s, there was a resurgence of interest in a broad range of exotic mythological dogmas. As in the 1960s, astrology and numerology became a fashionable coffee-house diversion. However, the postwar Austro-German counterculture was merely a flowering of an undercurrent that had been rippling through the salons of the educated middle class throughout the latter nineteenth century. During this Germanic “New Age,” there had been a growing interest in mysticism and alternative theologies, from Rosicrucianism to Kaballah, from Buddhism to ancient Egyptian beliefs—and especially the old paganism of Nordic gods and heroes. Indeed, the latter had been current in German pop culture since the 1870s, when composer Richard Wagner had popularized the tales in his grandiose operatic cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung). This mammoth work, which became a favorite of the Völkisch movement, consisted of four operas: Das Rheingold (The Rhine Gold), Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods), the stories of which read like an encyclopedia of Germanic pagan lore. Wagner borrowed from the Eddas and Nibelunglied to craft a four-part tale that includes the great hero Siegfried, as well as Rhine maidens, who guard the hidden gold from which the titular ring was crafted; ugly dwarves; the valkyries (the women warriors of Germanic legend); the primeval earth goddess Erda; and Wotan himself.
Guido Karl Anton List (1848–1919), who called himself Guido von List, was the godfather of Völkisch Germanic mysticism in the early twentieth century. He was also the creator of the Armanen Futharkh runic system, which he claimed to have received in a vision. Born in Vienna, he had followers throughout Germany as well as Austria. Author’s collection
While the prewar Germanic New Age had broadly embraced the popular utopian Völkische movement, after the war, the Völkisch ideals were especially resonant among the nationalists. It was not so much that they were keen to get dirt under their fingernails planting beets or cabbage, as it was that they were attracted to the idealistic Völkisch association with German ethnicity. Identification with one’s ethnicity is neither uncommon nor inherently negative. The Irish flags that one sees on bumper stickers in Boston around St. Patrick’s Day, or the Mexican flags seen on bumper stickers in Los Angeles, are examples of the same Völkisch idea. At its “blut und boden” extreme, however, the Völkische concept can be extrapolated as implying ethnic or racial superiority.
Meanwhile, the dark side of any counterculture contains characters who emerge to exploit an interest that a group may have in a particular doctrine. In the United States of the 1960s, as middle-class children dabbled in esoteric doctrines from witchcraft to Tibetan Tantraism, lifestyle gurus such as Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert used ancient religious doctrine to fashion a widely popular cult religion around psychedelic drugs. While Leary and Alpert had used correlations to mystical aspects of Hinduism and Buddhism to legitimize their psychedelic precepts, many of the prophets in the German counterculture of the 1920s embraced aspects of the ancient roots of Germanic paganism. While Leary quoted liberally from the Bhagavad Gita, the seminal text of Hinduism, Völkisch gurus delved into the ancient myths and lore from the Eddas and the Nibelunglied, as well as tales of the ancient Nordic pantheon.
The Timothy Leary of the Austro-German counterculture at the turn of the century was a man who called himself Guido von List. He was born Guido Karl Anton List in Vienna on October 5, 1848, fifty-two years and two days before the birth of Heinrich Himmler. Similar to Himmler’s claim of being a reborn royal, List later added the aristocratic “von” to his name to pump up his prestige. To legitimize such a claim to aristocracy, he insisted that he was descended from Burckhardt von List, a twelfth-century knight who is mentioned in Germania Topo-Chrono-Stemmato-Graphica by Gabriel Bucelinuss, published in Nuremberg (Nürnberg in German) in the seventeenth century.
Like Heinrich Himmler, Guido List was born into comfortable middle-class circumstances that permitted him opportunities for daydreaming and for his imagination to create an alternate universe. Guido’s father, Karl Anton List, was a well-to-do leather merchant. Just as Himmler’s fantasies were fueled by his views of the cold stone walls of Burg Trusnitz, the fires of List’s later obsession for Nordic paganism were stoked by a field trip to the catacombs beneath the city of Vienna at the age of fourteen. Within these damp and musty cellars, specifically beneath the old city post office, his tour group came to an old altar, which he decided, or was told, had actually originated as a shrine for the worship of Wotan.
“We climbed down,
and everything I saw and felt excited me with a kind of power that today I am no longer able to experience,” List wrote in his 1891 book Deutsch-Mythologische Landschaftsbilder. “At that point my excitement was raised to fever pitch, and before this altar I proclaimed out loud this ceremonial vow: ‘Whenever I get big, I will build a Temple to Wotan!’ I was, of course, laughed at, as a few members of the party said that a child did not belong in such a place.” But List had found his personal connection with the hallowed being he believed presided over the very roots of the Germanic identity.
Like Himmler, List was one of those excitable boys who did not discard the nineteenth-century equivalent of Dungeons and Dragons fantasies as he became a man. Though he dutifully went into his father’s leather business, List also freelanced as a writer, initially penning articles mainly for outdoors and mountaineering publications such as the Neue Deutsche Alpenzeitung, the German alpine newspaper. As an avid outdoorsman, List readily adopted the Völkische rural romanticism, preferring field and stream to the noise and bustle of modern city life. After his father died in 1877, List turned to journalism full time and began writing more and more about metaphysics and mysticism, including spirits and sprites that he imagined inhabiting the natural world. (It was in the following year that he began occasionally inserting the “von” into his name, although he would not use it consistently until after the turn of the century.) List’s mystical writings were increasingly focused on Völkische themes and on the origins of the German identity, which he traced back to Wotan himself. He came to believe in a primeval cult of priests called Armanen, whose powers flowed directly from Wotan. His source for the term “Armanen” was a recent translation of the book De Origine et Situ Germanorum (The Origin and Situation of the Germans), written by the Roman historian Gaius Cornelius Tacitus in about AD 98. In the book, Tacitus describes Germanic tribes living beyond the boundaries of the Roman Empire, calling them Irminones. From “Irminones,” List derived “Armanen” as the name of the primeval priestly cult of the Germans.